Jesus in Memory

Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives

Werner H. Kelber

Publication Year: 2009

Few scholars have influenced New Testament scholarship in the areas of orality, memory, and tradition more profoundly than Birger Gerhardsson. Today, as these topics have again become important in biblical scholarship, his pioneering work takes on a new light. Though the esteemed contributors may differ on issues in the burgeoning study, they have all enthusiastically taken on the dual task of evaluating Gerhardsson’s contribution anew and bringing his insights up to date within the current debate.

Kelber front cover

Kelber.pdf

Contents

Introduction

The present book is about memory and tradition, and a host of
related issues. The relationship between the two is far from evident.
Modern society venerates various sites of artificial memory that distance
traditional knowledge and information from human memory while turning
our minds into a blur of diverging ...

1-Form Criticism

Birger Gerhardsson is well known throughout the international
New Testament scholarly world as a scholar of the highest repute.
He has been accorded many honors, including being elected president
of the international Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas in 1990.1 His
major scholarly work, Memory and Manuscript, ...

2-The Jesus Tradition as Oral Tradition

Birger Gerhardsson has made an inestimable impact on the field of
New Testament studies. Our collective knowledge and understanding
of the shape and texture of the Jesus tradition has been forever
changed by his groundbreaking work which has deeply influenced
countless colleagues through his forty-plus ...

3-Jesus Tradition and the Pauline Letters

This essay is written in honor of my friend and colleague, Birger
Gerhardsson, a pioneer in the study of oral tradition in early Judaism
and early Christianity. After reviewing the major contribution that
Gerhardsson has made to New Testament scholarship, the essay will
survey and critique some of the ...

4-Honi the Circler in Manuscript and Memory: An Experiment in “Re-Oralizing” the Talmudic Text

Birger Gerhardsson’s classic, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition
and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity,
has inspired and shaped my work since I first encountered it in
graduate school in the late 1970s. I have dipped into it repeatedly since
then, as my own thinking about rabbinic ...

5-Memory and Tradition in the Hellenistic Schools

Critical attention on Birger Gerhardsson’s Memory and Manuscript
has focused largely on the parallels between early Christian practice
and the practice of the rabbinic academies. But Gerhardsson points out
that the appeal to tradition is also a feature deeply rooted in the Hellenistic
world, “in schools for philosophers, ...

6-Memory

It was because Birger Gerhardsson was concerned for a history of the
gospel tradition grounded in historically attested cultural practices
that he came to assign to memory the crucial operational role in the origins
and transmission of tradition. In so doing, moreover, he anticipated
important contemporary developments ...

Conclusion: The Work of Birger Gerhardsson in Perspective

Half a century after Birger Gerhardsson wrote his signature piece,
Memory and Manuscript, the contributors to this volume, along
with the editors, are offering a reassessment of his scholarly accomplishments.
No doubt the status of New Testament studies at the outset of
the twenty-first century is impressively different ...

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